


Bureaucrats of the World, Unite

by Gunderpants



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 03:07:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2412698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunderpants/pseuds/Gunderpants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1984 is a mandatory part of the Hogwarts Muggles Studies curriculum. Dolors Umbridge has a unique reading all of her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bureaucrats of the World, Unite

**Author's Note:**

> originally written as gift fic back in 2007.

If there was one thing Oakden Hobday didn't like about his sixth year Muggle Studies class, it was that the school timetable had allocated the subject to first thing on a Monday morning. Most of his students, too, found it rather draining - particularly for the pureblood or wizard-raised students who found studying muggles to be far too taxing for early in the morning. It was not unusual to see his students traipsing in with coffee-stained robes or dark circles under their eyes, and on the odd occasion he would catch a student sneaking in a quick sleep. 

He'd hoped, in his final year before retirement, that the Muggle book they would study for the literature component of the course would be far better received than the one they'd read last year. Indeed, most of their students expressed their displeasure at reading 'Jane Eyre': one student, Remus Lupin (whom he knew to be the young werewolf that Albus Dumbledore had accepted into the school), had gone as far as scrawling the message _'please, Sir, never set a book like this again'_ at the bottom of his final discursive essay. 

He'd hoped that this year they'd be more engaged by a less romantic novel, and had set them to read, over the summer holidays, '1984' by George Orwell. In the first few weeks he could tell that most of them were having him on about having read it: one cheeky Slytherin had said that his favourite part had been the one about monkeys. With many vague threats, he'd forced his students to promise to have the book read by the next class, and as they filtered into the classroom that morning he could tell with the even blearier eyes that they had, indeed, read their text.

"Now," he said, with his back to the class as he hastily scratched some numbers on the blackboard, "would anyone like to explain to me what the themes of the book were?"

Two hands shot up; a sandy-haired Hufflepuff boy and a small girl with dark hair who sat behind Lily Evans. Hobday nodded in the direction of the boy from Hufflepuff, who looked a bit nervous around the class and cleared his throat.

"Erm... um... it was about the law, and stuff."

"All right... fair call... do you want to elaborate about that?"

"Um... " The boy turned to the person sitting next to them and whispered something fervently into their ear. The other person nodded, and he looked back. "It's, um, about how much control the government has over us?"

"Better. You, over there," he said, pointing in the direction of the girl. 

"Is it about the truth and how those in power can distort what the truth is?"

"Very good. I'm glad to see that someone's actually read the book."

"But we have, sir!" called the familiar boy from Slytherin who straightened his tie with an insolent smile. "I can give you a theme if you want. It's about how power is held by placing people in a constant state of fear and conflict."

Hobday looked at the Slytherin boy with a slight smile; he wondered if the young man in front of him had any idea that one of the alumni of his own house was gaining power by creating fear amongst the wizarding world. "Five points to Slytherin," he said drily, "for actually reading the bloody book."

From the back of the room, he could see Remus Lupin raise his hand tentatively. Hobday nodded in his direction, and he closed his book.

"One thing I noticed about this book was that there seemed to be no right for people to have their own secrets and privacy: as if even desiring to have your own thought or life that you choose to make for yourself is completely outlawed. Like how you can't choose to be with the person you want because they thought sex... you know, with someone you might actually love, was a complete act of freedom that they couldn't control." He cleared his throat, and turned his eyes down to his desk. "I was sort of sad when they made Winston and Julia hate each other. I liked them together."

Another boy in Griffyndor robes made a low wolf-whistle, and the class cracked up in laughter. Lupin's face turned red, and Hobday rapped his wand against the blackboard to silence them. "Did you just?"

"I liked what it symbolised: that she was young and carefree, and sort of free, and it made him happy to be with her and actually feel something genuine after all those two-minute hate sessions." He smiled. "I thought at the beginning that Winston was a bit of a stale old bore, actually."

"Can't blame him really in a society like that though, can you?"

"I suppose not, sir."

The students nodded, half-heartedly. They were, at least, paying enough attention to the vibe of the room that they knew when and how they were expected to react. Not bad, for eight thirty in the morning. "Good, good," Hobday said, clapping his hands together. "Now, as far as--"

"Hem! Hem!" 

Hobday looked across the room, expecting to see a hand raised straight in the air like a flagpole. Instead, he could see the bobbing of a head with a big blue ribbon stuck atop it.

"You should all know that I don't appreciate it when students speak out of turn," he said sternly, frowning at the bobbing head. "Would you like to say something, Miss... Umbridge, is it?"

"Yes, sir," she said, sticking her head out into the aisle. "I was just going to comment that everyone in here seemed to look on the government in the book rather negatively."

"Well, that's how I believe that Orwell wished to portray them," said Lily Evans. "The audience sees them as being bad because the author wants us to."

"Oh, of course I know that," she said with a tittering laugh. "But who is the author to tell us what we want to read? I think that the government had every right to watch its citizens like that. They might have been in a dangerous time."

"I believe that the author is trying to draw parallels to events in Muggle history, and how those governments manipulated their own citizens out of fear of losing power," Hobday said, eager to return to his class plan. "Now, if we--"

"But don't you see that those parallels might not be fair ones to how our world works?" Her voice was sickly sweet, but he could hear the daggers behind it. "Maybe they had reasons for watching their citizens, did you ever think of that?" Dolores Umbridge's eyes surveyed the class coldly, somehow missing the gagging sounds made by the Slytherin boy to his partner. "I think that people should be watched if they're going to break the law or think things that simply aren't beneficial to society?"

"Who are you to say what's beneficial or not?" said Hobday, now leaning back on his desk. 

"Oh, that's not for me to decide. I think there are wizards far cleverer and older than you and I who know what's best for us and should watch out that people don't step out of line and endanger us all." She giggled again, and not for the first time Oakden Hobday regretted that using a cane on students had been banned by recent Ministry decree. "I think that it was Winston's own fault that he was killed at the end. He should have followed the rules of his government. It's not anybody's fault but his own that he was a bad citizen."

"Even if the rules are unfair and restrictive?" asked Remus Lupin with a slight frown on his normally mild face. "Even if it means that some people will be forced to live as outcasts in poverty?"

"I'm sure little things like privacy and frivolous choice are a small price to pay if it means our governments protect us from filthy, dangerous criminals. I would certainly feel better if a government was watching over us to make sure that dangerous half-breeds and muggleborns weren't planning an uprising over us." Umbridge finally sat back down in her chair. "I'm sorry, Professor Hobday, did I interrupt you?"

Hobday looked across his classroom for a moment and regarded the dumpy young witch who had disrupted his class plans. For a minute he gazed into her eyes and didn't know if he could see anything in the first place; as if she was born without a soul to split in the first place. He forced himself to break the gaze, and picked up the chalk once more and, with a final look over his shoulder, he saw Lily Evans' mouth agape and an artificially calm look on Remus Lupin's face. He interrupted the silence with the screeching of chalk.


End file.
